comicbookGRRRLDo not offend the chair leg of truth; it is wise and terrible.

With the Marvel hip hop variants causing quite the argument across comics land regarding appreciation versus appropriation, Black Mask Studios publisher Matt Pizzolo contacted me to talk about another set of hip hop covers and how Black Mask is tackling the thorny issue of diversity in comics.

Matt Pizzolo: Yeah for what it’s worth the characters of Young Terrorists are ethnically diverse — the core team is a black man, a Chinese young woman, a Guatemalan young man, and a white woman who’s the heiress to an oppressive power structure and knows she has to reject and combat that — but I realize I’m a white man writing this stuff and my collaborator/cover artist, Amancay Nahuelpan, he’s Chilean but he grew up in Vancouver and we can’t hide behind the characters… although I do think those characters are partly what makes the hardcore hip hop homages feel thematically genuine to the story.

It’s hard to A/B these covers and assign “who’s more appropriating” or whatever, and certainly I’m not the one to judge that anyway, but obviously we’re both appropriating. All we can do is try and be creative while showing respect to those who came before us and who inspired our work.